When The Man Comes Snikt

Conditions: Cold, and Hard.

Film Review: Logan

I went for a walk at lunchtime this week and ended up at a nice cafe.  I decided to order a toasted bagel with cream cheese and bacon.  I figured that the cream cheese would be bacon-flavoured, or that there'd be little bacon bits in it, but no.  I got a whole pottle of cream cheese and two giant rashers of bacon with my bagel.  I looked at it for a while, thinking.  I know how dangerous bacon is, and that you shouldn't have too much of it.  Then I thought back to Logan.  Man, I slathered that bacon and cream cheese all over my bagels, and enjoyed every last bite.

Logan is the saddest and most violent film I've ever seen.  Moments not spent fighting back tears are spent wincing in sympathy as a legion of bad guys are brutally butchered in gruesome glory.  All the years spent wondering about how an R-rated Wolverine movie would really work have been answered in full.  Unsurprisingly it turns out it's basically blood-soaked carnage.  Amid the carnage, though, is a heartbreaking tale.  This is the end.  It really is.

So, it's 2029, and everything sucks.  Logan now works as a Limo driver in Mexico to make enough money to buy drugs that he then gives to Charles, who is living in hiding in some Mexican backwater, slowly losing his powerful mind to some form of dementia.  All the mutants are gone, we learn some died in an accident involving Xavier, others have been taken by the authorities or have lost their powers.  Logan is worn down, sick, drunk and tired.  It seems the Admantium metal he has is starting to poison him.  He has some loose idea to buy a boat so he and Charles can escape to the ocean.

But then!   A new mutant appears, a little girl who can heal fast and has Admantium claws of her own.  Turns out she is a daughter, of sorts, of Logan, who was raised by the military to be a weapon.  And they want her back.  She believes there's a haven up in Canada, so before you can say Road Trip, we're on a road trip, only ever one step ahead of a bottomless well of killers.

And it's the saddest and most violent road trip ever, involving two old and broken men, and a feral girl.  There's a couple of heartbreaking interludes, involving a casino of victims and a nice doomed family.  For a while there, I thought Logan might change.  But no.  The moral of this story seems to be: nothing ever really changes.  Everyone is stuck how they are.  There is no hope at all.  There's no happy ending here, there's no nice send off, or even any real hope at all.  Everything is shit, and then you die.  So you might as well enjoy as much bacon as you can.  Bon Apetit.  One severed head out of five.